"Don't go mad and reduce the whole screen to rubble," wrote the book's improbable author. "You'll find yourself dodging bricks, and will be stoned to death like an Iranian rapist."

It's too soon to tell whether that impressive quote will be the tagline of Universal's possible upcoming adaptation of the hugely successful vector-graphics Atari game about an almost sad-looking spaceship stuck in an asteroid field teeming with hostile UFOs.